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Asia Continues to be Facebook's Strongest Growth Region
By Ben LoricaNovember 20, 2009
With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users...
The War For the Web
By Tim O'ReillyNovember 16, 2009
On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active. It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links. if you’re...
So Long iPod, Hello E-Reader
By William StanekNovember 4, 2009
William Stanek here, talking about electronic paper displays (EPDs). In my earlier blog entries, I introduced EPDs, discussed how the technology works, and delved briefly into ways they're being used. Now, I'll dig in and take a closer look at...
Using Flash Remoting for Authentication to your AFCS/Facebook AIR Application
By Russ FergusonNovember 3, 2009
If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggest you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.
Linux Netbooks: They're Still Out There
By Caitlyn MartinOctober 23, 2009
I found a wide variety of systems with Linux available from mainstream outlets and factory direct, at least here in the United States where I live. While I don't have updated market share figures it's clear, despite claims by Microsoft and their supporters, that Linux remains entrenched in the netbook market and is spreading out from there.
Four short links: 22 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 22, 2009
Eight Billion Minutes Spent on Facebook Daily -- you weren't using that cognitive surplus, were you? How We Made Github Fast -- high-level summary is that the new "fast, good, cheap--pick any two" is "fast, new, easy--pick any two". (via Simon Willison) Isaac Mao, China, 40M Blogs and Counting -- Today, there are 40 million bloggers in China and...
Windows 7 is Here! - Win free Ebooks.
By Laurel AckermanOctober 21, 2009
Windows 7 becomes widely available today, and O'Reilly has 2 new books to help you make the most of it.
The Day The Netbook Died
By Caitlyn MartinOctober 7, 2009
On that Friday, with no warning, the little netbook failed to boot up. I couldn't even get to the BIOS. For the third time a Sylvania netbook I owned had suffered a premature hardware failure.
Collaborative Publishing: One Brand New Title, One Success
By Keith FahlgrenSeptember 29, 2009
Another site focused on collaborative publishing, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, launches while we look back on the first attempt to improve manuscripts by engaging the community in an open and collaborative dialog with the authors, Programming Scala.
Summer of Flash Episode 11 - Ed Sullivan
By Garth BraithwaiteSeptember 25, 2009
Ed Sullivan from Adobe joins us on this episode to announce the Adobe Cookbooks website upgrade. We also talk about Adobe's recent acquisition announcements (Omniture and Business Catalyst). Panel of Experts: Leif Wells and Zach Stepek. Download this week's...
Adobe Cookbook 2.0
By Rich TretolaSeptember 25, 2009
Adobe has announced that the brand new Adobe Cookbooks application is now live! This new Adobe Cookbook application replaces the existing individual cookbook applications that existed for Flex, AIR and Mobile. The new application still supports those technologies, and adds an additional dozen or so technologies, within a new single application.
There are Over a Million People Actively Using Facebook Right Now
By Ben LoricaSeptember 24, 2009
A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong. Currently reaching only 1% of potential users in Asia and Africa, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in both regions: Growth in...
Report: Facebook A Haven For Hate Groups
By Caitlyn MartinSeptember 18, 2009
Dr. Oboler published a new report on Tuesday and this time he has targeted Facebook and with good reason. Despite a prohibition in the popular social networking website's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, it's terms of service, Facebook has remained a happy home for Holocaust denial and racist "white pride" groups.
Fallacious Celebrations of Facebook Fans
By Mark DrapeauSeptember 16, 2009
Publishing "top 10" lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers' eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: "Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans." For the record, this list is topped by the White House with...
Show Off Your O'Reilly Media Books!
By Mary RotmanSeptember 15, 2009
Have a bookshelf full of O'Reilly books like our Facebook Fans Michael Pelikan and Kay Bieri do? Use it to win more! Take a picture or record a short video of your books and post it on the O'Reilly Media Facebook Page before 5pm PT Thursday, September 17, for a chance to win two ebooks of your choice.
Labor Day Weekend Question Contest Has Ended - We have our winners
By Laurel AckermanSeptember 9, 2009
Thanks so much to those who took the time to leave a comment to our Labor Day Weekend Question post. We have our winners.
New Book "Hacking: The Next Generation"
By Nitesh DhanjaniSeptember 5, 2009
My new book "Hacking: The Next Generation" is now available.
Facebook App Case Study: Additional elements and gotchas
By Mirza HatipovicAugust 14, 2009
Welcome back to the series and the concluding article of the exciting facebook series. So far we worked hard to implement features like the front end, administration, loading of YouTube videos etc. In the last article the application came finally to life. We implemented a database that contains 14 levels for the game.
Facebook App Case Study: Front-end Module
By Mirza HatipovicAugust 5, 2009
Welcome back to our exciting series. In the last article, we discussed about the administrative part of the application, where we implemented a background activity to allow every application user to upload their own videos and add mistakes. This time we will work on the front end that will be visible to everyone by default and where the main game play will take place. Before we start with the development, there are important things that need to be considered. First of all, there will be 14 levels to play, 14 levels means 14 video clips, 14 movie snippets.
Facebook App Case Study: Administration module
By Mirza HatipovicAugust 3, 2009
Last time we talked about the way how to work with YouTube videos and how to implement those into our app. We worked hard to implement typical features that can be found on most video sites like play, pause, seek etc. We even have the feature to seek through the video using the Seek Bar that we built from scratch. As we already know, there is one external library used in our application that allows us to load videos into the swf and manipulate the video using ActionScript 3.0. This is a huge advantage since the official YouTube library is written in AS2 and it does not fit our project requirements. Using the library, we were able to create video controls using pure ActionScript 3.0.
Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road
By Mark SigalJuly 29, 2009
My once-beloved San Francisco Chronicle has been “hollowed out,” reduced to a thin pamphlet, thereby accelerating their subscriber attrition. Do you even know anyone who actually uses the Yellow Pages? Remember record stores? Whither Blockbuster? When analog media collides with digital media, “creative destruction” occurs with brutal efficiency…unless you can truly differentiate your offering, a tall task, but not an insurmountable one. Read on
Facebook App Case Study: Integrating YouTube Videos
By Mirza HatipovicJuly 22, 2009
Welcome back to our series. In the previous article, we discussed the elements that are the necessary building blocks of the application MovieExpert (http://apps.facebook.com/movieexpert/). We created the main swf, we created the invite screen, we worked hard to make the invite screen actually work on our iFrame. Now that we have all those details done, we can move on and concentrate entirely on the application in the swf file. We know that the invite screen on facebook appears only when the use installs the application, the next time he logs in, he will be redirected directly to http://apps.facebook.com/movieexpert/.
Apple has secretly released a Tablet Computer: It's called iPod touch
By Mark SigalJuly 14, 2009
Because the iPod touch is often overshadowed by its noisier sibling, the iPhone, we sometimes forget that Apple's first REAL foray into tablet computing, has already sold 15M+ units.
Facebook App Case Study: Preparing the Elements
By Mirza HatipovicJuly 8, 2009
Welcome back! Finally we will work on a real world application that will go live. The application that we will be creating will be named “Movie Expert”. One reason why I chose it is because I am an avid Movie fan and I will have lots of motivation to work on it in detail. The other reason is because it is really a sample that has the potential to utilize the facebook actionscript 3 library the proper way.
Send Gifts Component
By Mirza HatipovicJuly 8, 2009
Sending gifts and items are one of the favorite actions among the millions of facebook users. Friends send items to friends, "buy" gifts, "sell" virtual items etc. Honestly I am not engaged in this activity a lot on facebook, but the number of people willing to send virtual gifts, buy virtual goods is shockingly high! So this article might be underestimated on the first sight, but because I am aware of the trend of sending and receiving gifts, it is worth writing a complete article that covers the trend in actionscript. The number of possible implementations for this component is really countless and in this article we will be able to show only few of them.
Four short links: 8 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 8, 2009
Stop Whining About Facebook's Redesign (Slate) -- How can I be so sure that you'll learn to like the redesign? Because you did the last two times Facebook did it. The conclusion is that sites don't say why they're redesigning, and that causes the resistance. C# and CLI under the Community Promise (Miguel de Icaza) -- Microsoft have announced...
Search Friends Component
By Mirza HatipovicJuly 6, 2009
Welcome back to the series. In the previous articles we discussed topics like publishing of news, sending notifications to specific friends etc. The articles covered topics that are not only bound to the user interface in the facebook application development. This time, we are going to play around with the already existing (but complex) MultiFriend component. The component from the article 11 was quite good, but it really had the potential to be a kick ass component for facebook. There were things I wanted to implement, but was not able to because the whole article covered the basic construction of the component.
Jonathan Heiliger on Web Performance, Operations, and Culture
By Jesse RobbinsJune 24, 2009
We were honored to have Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of Technology Operations, as our opening keynote speaker at Velocity. Jonathan is one of the most accomplished leaders in our field, and is a master of the craft. Here is his keynote in it’s entirety:...
John Viega Explains What Motivates Bad Guys
By Sara PeytonJune 23, 2009
Longtime security professional John Viega reports on the sorry state of security in his new book, The Myths of Security: What the Computer Security Industry Doesn't Want You to Know. "Today, the tech world might hear a lot about security issues, but the world at large rarely does," writes security expert Viega, In this excerpt from The Myths of Security Viega explains what motivates bad guys to break into computers.
Review of "Beautiful Security" Book
By Anton ChuvakinJune 22, 2009
"Beautiful Security" from O'Reilly, which I just finished reading, is truly an awesome book. Now, I will probably have a high opinion of my own chapter ("Beautiful Log Handling") since it took some work (eh... and one near-complete rewrite) to...
Facebook Adds Million of Users in Asia
By Ben LoricaJune 19, 2009
Since my previous post on Facebook users by country, the company has grown rapidly in Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook grew 90% in Asia going from 11.4 to 21.7 million active users. With a Market Penetration of only 0.6% in Asia, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in the region. The company also gained 11.3M users in Europe...
User Info Component
By Mirza HatipovicJune 17, 2009
Welcome back to the series. This time we are goings to build a really exciting component that will be used to simply display information about the user. Well, you might say why to we need such a component, is there are real purpose behind that? Well, in my opinion, yes. There are a lot of facebook applications out there done in Flash where we see information about the friends etc. During the process of facebook application development, there will always be a need to quickly display information about the specific friend. The information that is contained inside the component could be every bit of information that was entered by the user.
Publish News Component
By Mirza HatipovicJune 17, 2009
Welcome back to our exciting Facebook ActionScript series. In this article we will discuss one of most important (and most exciting) features of the FB platform, it's the publishing of news. We all know when we log in to facebook, we see plenty of news about our friends. Some were sent by the users, some where sent by applications. In lots of cases, the action is initiated by applications. We see stuff like "FriendX has just completed level 5", "FriendY just left the building" or "John just sent something to his friends", I'm sure you saw a lot of news similar to this on FB. News are an integral part of application because it's one of the ways that the virality of applications is ensured. Suppose we have the fanciest application on FB, what value we have out of this application if we do not publish any news, if we dont make sure the friends are not notified about the action don't in the application? The application simply needs to "talk" and publish news if the application user performed some action. We need to make sure everybody knows that we just topped the high score of the player from Nigeria.
Save 40%--Give your Geek Dad What He Really Wants!
By Sara PeytonJune 17, 2009
Give the Geek Dad in your life what he really wants. SAVE 40% on O'Reilly books, courses, workshops plus the OSCON and Velocity conferences. If we receive your order by 9 AM EST on 6/18, your gift will arrive in time for Father's Day (U.S. addresses only and choose overnight shipping). Use discount code DAD40.
Notification Component
By Mirza HatipovicJune 10, 2009
The notifications are one of the most interesting (and important) parts of the facebook area. In order to completely understand the Flash side of it, we need to understand the basics of the facebook notification, what it is and how...
Samrat Yantra--The Largest Sundial in the World
By Sara PeytonJune 10, 2009
If you're dreaming about your summer vacation check out the new travelers' guide from O'Reilly, The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive ($29.99), by John Graham-Cumming. In this excerpt you'll learn about India's Samrat Yantra, the largest sundial in the world and capable of telling the time, day or night, with an accuracy of about two seconds.. A discussion of the celestial coordinate systems is also included.
FBML, YML, OSML oh my! HTML, meet Social
By David RecordonJune 5, 2009
Given how quickly the Social Web is coming together, I believe that HTML will need to support social elements someday soon. It's great to see this type of innovation by Facebook running in the wild, but the web itself ultimately evolves best when multiple competing approaches come together. Just as OAuth brought together the best practices from AOL, Flickr, Google, Yahoo! and others, there is a similar opportunity to bring together FBML, YML and OSML along with the client-side benefits of XFBML.
O'Reilly Week in Review for June 1st, 2009
By James TurnerJune 3, 2009
This week, we have a chat with John Viega, co-editor of Beautiful Security, the latest book in O'Reilly's "Beautiful" series, about what makes security beautiful, as well as what steps consumers and enterprises need to take to be secure these...
Nikola Tesla--The Man Who Lit Up the World - An Excerpt from The Geek Atlas
By Sara PeytonMay 28, 2009
The history of science is all around us, if you know where to look. And if you're a traveler who loves science, you'll definitely want to check out at a timely new resource from O'Reilly, The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive ($29.99), by John Graham-Cumming. Arriving just in time for summer vacation planning, this unique travelers' guide covers 128 interesting destinations around the globe where major breakthroughs in science, mathematics, or technology occurred--or are happening now. Read about the Tesla Museum, in Belgrade, Serbia in this excerpt from The Geek Atlas now.
Multifriend Selection Component
By Mirza HatipovicMay 26, 2009
Welcome back to our series. We will continue to work on components that will help us develop facebook applications faster and with less bugs. There is one quite useful component that will will be used throughout the facebook development and that's the MultiFriend Selection Component. There is already one developed by facebook and is displayed when using standard FBML.
Enhanced status component
By Mirza HatipovicMay 26, 2009
In the last article we worked extensively with the ProfilePic component and showed how the component can be used in real time scenarios. We had an interesting example of a real word application with the "Would you..." application clone. I really had a lot of fun working on it and hope you too. For us it's important that we were able to work with components that where previously build based on the previous articles. The goal is not to hurt the "DRY“ principle, which means "Don't repeat your self". Every component that was created needs to reused again so no development time will be spent on them anymore, except when extending it. This tutorial will deal mostly with text. The idea of the application is the following: We need to create some sort of "Mood Checker", an application that will allow us to browse through the statuses of users.
Writing a book by competition
By Simon St. LaurentMay 19, 2009
I've worked on lots of collaborative books before. Now, I'm starting on something different: a book written by competition.
2 Years Later, the Facebook App Platform is Still Thriving
By Ben LoricaMay 13, 2009
In a few weeks, the Facebook application platform will mark its second anniversary. While it garnered lots of press coverage in the months after it launched, the arrival of the iTunes app store shifted attention away from Facebook's vibrant ecosystem. The media glow is understandable: among other things, the younger iTunes platform is adding apps at a much faster rate...
Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow
By Tim O'ReillyMay 10, 2009
I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend”-based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a...
Hacking Primes in Mathematica
By Mike LoukidesMay 10, 2009
If this is too esoteric, skip it. I couldn't figure out anywhere else to put it. This morning, Tim Bray tweeted about a post on prime numbers and Benford's law. To cut the esoterica short, one of the big problems in prime numbers is that people don't know how they're distributed. This post suggests that Benford's Law describes the distribution...
Extended ProfilePic Component with Effects
By Mirza HatipovicMay 8, 2009
In this article we will extend the ProfilePic component from the last article and show example of how we can use it in real world scenarios. We will create a facebook application that asks the user a question about the displayed friend. Yes, it is in fact a copy of an existing application (I don’t remember the name and I don’t want to make advertising). The application simply switches from one question to another and associates the displayed friend with the question. Like, for ex., the question appears “Would you ever like to date Monica?" and the application user can simply select between “Yes” of “No”. On the other side, you can choose if you want that the answer is send to the user as a notification. Personally I enjoyed the application and will use it as reference to make a flash version out of it. On the other side, we will use the component and add features to it so the sample will demonstrate how useful the component can be in the development process. We will have the freedom to create our own questions. They can be stored either in the database or XML, but in our case it will be stored in a flat XML file.
ProfilePic Component
By Mirza HatipovicMay 8, 2009
In the last article we discussed how components are built with the facebook api in mind. Now it's the time to do something more with it. We know how things need to be set up in order for the components to work. We learned about sessions, about the tow frame time line structure of the components and we talked about the inheritance of the UIComponent class. The previous example leveraged just a small potion of the methods that UIComponent provides. In this article we will take more advantange of the UIComponent class in order to create a component for the profile pic.
Component Architecture for Facebook Applications
By Mirza HatipovicMay 8, 2009
In the last tutorial we discussed the new library that was released by Adobe. The new library from Adobe fits much more naturally into the whole architecture of facebook applications that are built using the Flash platform. We need to know that the previous approach using the PHP library is not useless. In order to create stable and useful Facebook applications we need to know about many ways how to achieve the same goal. If you followed the series from the start then you are on a good way to be able to create truly cutting edge Facebook apps as we have discussed have to grab results from DB and we also make use of the ActionScript library.
Women in Tech Rock! Join our Mother's Day Celebration - Give a Tech Book & Get 40% Off
By Sara PeytonMay 8, 2009
Twitterer @HilaryP is a developer, a technical evangelist, and the pregnant mommy of a toddler. And though she likes girly things like yoga and beauty products as much as the next gal she was also looking for a Mother's Day discount that appealed to her geeky desires. Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media agreed. And that's why we're now celebrating Mother's Day with a 40% off discount on tech books on oreilly.com. We're also posting photos of Moms with their favorite tech books here. Please send us your fav pics at press@oreilly.com.
Sarah Milstein and The Twitter Book featured on The Agenda - Canada's Top Current Affairs Show Talks about Twitter and Its Impact on Journalism
By Sara PeytonMay 5, 2009
Hosted by award-winning journalist Steve Paiken, The Agenda explored Twitter and it's impact on how we get and share the news in last night's show. Twitter expert and coauthor of The Twitter Book, Sarah Milstein, joined the Toronto based show from a studio in San Francisco. Jay Rosen, professor with the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Amber MacArthur, new media journalist and web strategist, Mathew Ingram, the communities editor at The Globe and Mail, and David Cohn is the founder of Spot.us--a nonprofit project to pioneer community funded reporting--also joined the discussion. Take a look.
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